Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies at 80

Author Tracy Kidder stands in his cottage in South Bristol, Maine, on Sept. 26, 2005. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach, File)

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.

His son, Nat Kidder, confirmed to The Associated Press that Kidder died from lung cancer Tuesday at his daughter’s home in Boston.

Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work “The Soul of a New Machine,” which delved into the work of a fledgling computer company long before most people cared about the inner workings of Silicon Valley.

“It was like going into another country,” Kidder told the AP at the time. “At first, I didn’t understand what anybody was saying.”

Over the ensuing decades, Kidder immersed himself in worlds he was previously unfamiliar with, producing richly researched books about topics that may not sound like light reading.

For 1989’s “Among Schoolchildren,” he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, for 1993’s “Old Friends,” he observed the dark side of growing old in America while also chronicling how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities.

Turning these events at a Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a cohesive narrative was one of his major challenges, Kidder told the AP.

“Not a lot happens, and yet I think when you read it, you feel that a lot does. Small things have to count for a great deal,” he said.

In 2003, Kidder wrote “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about a doctor’s effort to bring health care to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers as numerous universities added it to their reading lists.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains changed my life--and the lives of so many others around the world,” John Green, author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” wrote on social media Wednesday.

The book even inspired the indie rock band Arcade Fire’s 2010 hit “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”

“Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did,” Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House said in a statement Wednesday.

All the while, Kidder was careful to eschew focusing on his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, afraid that if he spent too much time in one of those realms, it might cause him to “feel sick of it.”

Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for ROTC to avoid the Vietnam War draft.

After graduation, despite thinking he would be assigned a Washington communications intelligence role, Kidder was instead sent off to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was placed in charge of an eight-man rear-echelon radio research detachment that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.

Kidder documented the confounding experience in 2005’s “My Detachment,” an often humorous memoir that offered insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the 500,000-plus U.S. military personnel who were in Vietnam at the height of the buildup when the author served there in 1968-1969. The war became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on a map.”

After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the Midwest so Kidder could enroll in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where he latched onto the New Journalism wave pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious.”

The term creative nonfiction irked him too: “It suggests we make things up.”

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think of fiction and nonfiction as all that different, except that nonfiction is not invented,” he told the AP. “But I take exception to those people who think nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction ... They belong to storytelling.”

Kidder is survived by his wife, Fran, their two children, Nat Kidder and Alice Kidder Bukhman, and four grandchildren.

R.j. Rico, The Associated Press